A Diary, Some Poems (French irregular plural)

On the first of April 1992, Jacques Jouet, having invented the form known as the "daily poem," inaugurates a diary of poems, meant to last as long as an ordinary diary, which is to say, ideally, an entire lifetime. In preparation for this long journey, he arms himself with a strange sort of compass, composed of the assemblage of a turnip, a cloth, and an oeil-de-vieux ¹ (a tool painters use), all perfectly heterogeneous, which he defines, toward the beginning of his undertaking, with this three-line poem: "It's the composition of the world, / the part / for the whole of what's to come." The result is a series of poems entitled Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux. Published in December 1998 by P.O.L., in three volumes.

Portrait of the Artist as Turnip

Turnip is the perishable element of the three, and so it is as turnip that the artist notes down the date and place of each poem's composition.

Turnip is sensitive to touch: the dry and the damp, the hard and the soft, the new and the aging; and also open to transformations: "in three parts, a gidouille, an Ubu." ² And turnip might well also be Prévert's apple, with its terrifying seeds. ³

It is turnip, undoubtedly, who, on the causse Méjean, ⁴ sees sheep with five legs, "one of which / grazes." He keeps an exact albeit slightly anarchic count of the various parts of the body, its exertions, its rests: a nude from behind, head and ass, the thigh, the buttocks, a piece of ass.

As turnip, the artist is blunt. He is also moving and profoundly irritating, like a newborn baby or an old man, drooling, squinting, stinking, in a state of the most complete abandon. But in his sentimental and metaphysical dereliction, he is also capable of transforming himself into a mocoeur, ⁵ for "The heart never gets a moment's rest. / So, from time to time, make mock."

At other moments, turnip surprises us with his ruddy face and hale appearance. He sometimes reaches Mallarmean heights, becomes the celestial azure in the fevered brain of the poet.

Indeed, in the book, the list of different turnips comes a little before the list of recent readings.

He could be Queneau's dog at one moment, the painter Cueco's potato at another. ⁶

When he dreams, turnip's wild nocturnal imaginings upset the mathematically rigorous views of the oeil-de-vieux no less than the affable sociablity of the cloth.

He might, at the extreme, be the vegetable Christ. This is his Frankenstein aspect, at once frightening and endearing, with a certain infantile quality that echoes an imaginary playground rhyme: "hérons, hérons, / il n'y a pas de petits patapons." ⁷ Or again, as he dreams, turnip invents spiricole, the definition of which he provides on awakening: "a woods inhabited by capricorn beetles / reading a sestina."

This might be an example of what he calls l'art borigène, ⁸ an outgrowth of his firm intention to fulfill "conscientiously his turnipitude."

Then, when he strays into Berrychonne ⁹ terza rima (a secret of the oeil-de-vieux, more of which later), turnip begins to warp and swell his words, and so we see him "chubbify" the "melampygios." ¹⁰

Turnip dreams of himself as a Surmâle, ¹¹ a vulgum corpus or a petrification of a lapsus calamachine. ¹² And, in a melancholy mood, ruminates: "A little life carries you away from the void, a lot brings you closer."

We should not believe that turnip does not think; quite to the contrary, he gladly gives himself over to the "salad of thoughts" that "stitches up the fatigation of company."

This "dolesome turnip," who observes that "words do not put food on the table," nevertheless does not rule out, in his everyday modesty, the possibility of a personal sort of grandeur, for "Turnip is not in turnip," more or...